I include below a revision to Section 2.1.4 of the DCAT-AP spec ("INSPIRE Metadata Specification").
INSPIRE is a Directive [1] of the European Parliament and of the Council aiming to establish a EU-wide spatial data infrastructure to give cross-border access to information that can be used to support EU environmental policies, as well as other policies or activities having an impact on the environment. The actual scope of this information corresponds to 34 environmental themes [2], covering also areas having cross-sector relevance - e.g., addresses, buildings, population distribution and demography.
In order to ensure cross-border interoperability of data infrastructures operated by EU Member States, INSPIRE sets out a framework based on common specifications for metadata, data, network services, data and service sharing, monitoring and reporting. Such specifications consist of a set of implementing rules, along with the corresponding technical guidelines, defined by a regulatory committee composed of representatives of both EU Member States and EU bodies and institutions.
In INSPIRE, resource discovery is based on harmonised catalogue services, giving access to metadata on datasets, dataset series and services. The INSPIRE metadata schema is defined in the INSPIRE Metadata Regulation [3], and it includes a number of elements recognised by the INSPIRE regulatory committee as relevant for resource discovery, evaluation and use. Some of the key features include support to cross-language and spatial search, and semantic annotations based on controlled vocabularies and thesauri.
Following the INSPIRE implementation roadmap [4]. starting from November 2011 EU Member States are making available INSPIRE metadata and catalogue and view services. Such catalogues services are used by the INSPIRE Geoportal [5], operated by the European Commission, to harvest and index metadata, thus providing a single access point to discovery INSPIRE data and services from EU Member States.
In the last years, INSPIRE has seen an increasing support in both proprietary and open source software. Currently, INSPIRE extensions are available for the most used geospatial tools and platforms (e.g., ArcGIS, GeoNetwork and GeoServer), and also for general-purpose data platforms as CKAN [6].
Comments
Andrea, thanks for this. The text you povide is too long for the section -- other descriptions are one of two paragraphs long. I will use you text and try to summarise in two paragraphs.
Summary included in final draft http://joinup.ec.europa.eu/release/dcat-application-profile-data-portals-europe-final-draft